The Right Tool is an interesting view into programmers’ perception of various programming languages. It appeared last year, and has in the meantime built up quite a lot of data about a lot of different languages.
The results are interesting, to say the least.
A Halloween treat for you all – the Talking Board – a Flash-based medium for contacting the spirit world.
Place your cursor upon the planchette, hold down the cursor, and ask the spirits a question.
This project was written in Flash, using the Flex framework (the framework of the restless dead!), and is powered entirely by ectoplasm and occult magics.
Please note that I take no responsibility for hauntings, possession, poltergeist activity, nightmares or curses that may result through the use of this program – it’s all at your own risk.
Happy Halloween!
Erlang is pretty damn awesome, and I’ve been self-teaching it over the last month. The language is functional, fault-tolerant, super-concurrent, and easily run distributed over multiple computers. That’s a whole lot of awesome.
So, I needed a project to cut my teeth in, something simple, with nice, clear end goals. So I ported my Siege Unit Converter, a program I wrote ages ago to convert obscure MUT files into simple BMP files. Now, this wasn’t the ideal use-case for Erlang (converting images from one format to another is something that’s quite suited to imperative step-by-step code), but it’s a small project that doesn’t need anything especially complex from a language, so it was perfect for testing my Erlang skills.
So, I’ve just completed a flat move (woo!) after a two-week intensive decorating session, and it turns out programming and decorating are the same thing.
Games Workshop, purveyors of fine 28mm miniature goodness, seem to have finally cottoned on to the fact that the Internet, and especially social networking, are really powerful tools for communicating with their audience. From yesterday’s preliminary results, there’s an interesting paragraph:
Another initiative that has proven to be successful in growing our customer base has been the
introduction of Facebook across our Hobby centres. Traditionally, we have found that most customers
discover the Games Workshop Hobby by word of mouth from friends and family. With Facebook
becoming the new ‘word of mouth’ among many of our customers, individual Facebook accounts are
being rolled out to all 392 Games Workshop Hobby centres across the world. This allows each
manager to keep local hobbyists informed of activities and events, such as new product launches. It
also makes it easier for customers to recommend Games Workshop to friends and family.
Games Workshop have always shied away from new media, but it’s a welcome turn. Add to that their recent global campaign encouraging folks to upload pictures of their armies, and it looks like they’re finally entering the Internet age.
The other night, after eating a large number of shiitake mushrooms, I dreamed of implementing a cutting-edge sequel to Ultima Online entirely in the Reia programming language. Bizarre, I know (I’m not sure the Erlang virtual machine’s really the ideal target for the front-end of an MMORPG, but it makes sense for the back-end), but it made me wonder about the current status of this attempt to bring Ruby-like syntax to the Erlang world.
Much to my dismay, Reia has been discontinued, as of last week. Bugger.
Befunge-93 is an esoteric language, first conceived in 1993 by Chris Pressey. What makes it so unique is its multi-dimensional program pointer – whereas most programs execute from top to bottom, Befunge-93 can run from left to right, up to down, right to left, or down to up – and change while running the program.
Befunge-93 is all well and awesome, but what makes everything more awesome? HTML5 features. Therefore, I present to you, Befunge-93 Canvas.
This implementation should support all standard Befunge-93 commands (and none of the later 98 specification, yet, at least), but also proprietary Canvas-writing functions. Or just the one at the moment – allowing you to draw a single pixel at a time.
For some example programs (that don’t use the extra Canvas functionality), check out the original language designer’s site.
I’ll have some code examples and design patterns up next weekend. If you make anything awesome with it, I’d love to hear from you.
Angry-Lawyer.com has finally gone live – and with it, the source code to two of my projects! Check them out – Dwarf Fortress HeightMap – a map generator for Dwarf Fortress that takes height map data and turns it into parameters for your own world, and Siege Unit Converter – an image-file converter for the classic (and ancient) strategy game Siege.